Transgender Women

In
today’s current day and age, identity politics is a huge deal for many
Americans. It is important to identify who you are as a person through key
characteristics, and it helps to characterize how many obstacles you likely
have faced in your life. Common examples of demographics include blacks and
Asian (i.e. based on ethnicity) and also gay vs. straight (i.e. based on sexual
orientation).

Even
male vs. female is a legitimately important demographic, especially considering
how much sexism there is in the world today, indicating that women objectively
have it harder in life than men for various reasons. But an important
demographic combines both sexual orientation and gender. We are of course
talking about transgender people, and in particular, transgender women.

Transgender
women are people who were born as biological males but have since realized that
they are women on the inside. They have become quite prominent thanks to the
emergence Caitlyn Jenner (formerly known as Bruce Jenner), and today,
transgender people are properly recognized as a member of the LGBTQ community.

However,
unlike being lesbian, gay or bisexual, transgender people have it worse off.
For one, the confusion of who you are sexually attracted to is nothing like the
confusion of who you are as a person. Think about it – if every day you look
down at your genitals that you were born with and think something is wrong,
that is going to be a huge thing to deal with on a constant basis, and
something that you can’t escape from your thoughts, no matter how hard you try.

This
confusion also typically lasts longer than the confusion of not being
heterosexual. While most people realize what being homosexual or bisexual is in
their early high school years (if not early) and have seen at least a few of
their peers coming out of the closet, transgender people typically don’t know
how to interpret their confused feelings until they are well into adulthood.

This
is just how it is in today’s society. Because homosexuality is more well-known
and more widely accepted than transgenderism, people who are transgender may
know what they really are, and in fact may confuse their transgender nature as
just being homosexual or bisexual to some degree, which only makes things
harder to clarify as they get older.

Now
once a person has identified themselves as a transgender woman (i.e. born as a biological
male), it is now twice as difficult because you are dealing with all the
difficulties of being transgender along with identifying yourself as a women,
which comes with its own set of obstacles that all biological women are already
facing on a daily basis.

So
as much as you may feel like you are oppressed as a typical woman in American
society, keep in mind that transgender women have it a whole lot worse. They
need to essentially take on two separate sets of demographics, each with their
own distinct obstacles, and take them on as a single person. It is definitely
something that deserves our sympathy, not only as biological women, but as
compassionate people in general.